KF5 & Plasma 5 at work ;=)

In the last months, I didn’t get much time to work on Kate nor KTextEditor. Beside some small bugfixes and cleanups I got nothing commited :/

Guess one of the main issues is, I don’t use the KF5 based version of Kate that much ATM. At home, it is the only editor I use, but I have not much time to hack at home anyway.

Therefore today I installed the same setup on my work machine and will now use the KF5 based Kate for all of my day job, perhaps that motivates me more to take a look at the issues the Qt5/KF5 port still has.
(And I will work in a KDE Plasma 5 session with most stuff KF5 based now, including all important stuff like the nice Konsole ;=)

First update: The Get It page got an update to show how to install KF5 based Kate/KWrite from kate.git on openSUSE 13.2 😉 Feel free to send in the needed hints for other distros (to kwrite-devel@kde.org).
The installation hints for KDE 4.x based Kate got moved to Get It – KDE 4.x, to keep them intact!

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11 thoughts on “KF5 & Plasma 5 at work ;=)”

Hey. I’ve actually been using KF5’s Kate at work lately… I love the improvements, but there’s a few things I’d like to know.

There’s one thing that bothers me: when I use splits, the tab bar can easily end up eating a lot of space. Just a comment here, I have no idea how we could gain space and keep all the features.
Using the same tab bar for all the splits would be a solution, but I guess that would go against the design.

Then there’s this thing on the vim mode: I believe the Ctrl+W+Direction shortcut to go to the left/right/up/down split used to work (though I’m not entirely sure anymore). Is there any plan to bring it back (or on, if it wasn’t implemented before) ?

It’s real handy. Kate has some shortcuts to move between splits, but none of them really behave that way.

To have only one toplevel tabbar will be bit complicated ATM ;=)
For the vim mode keyboard shortcut: Actually, I am not using the VIM mode, but if that did work in KDE 4.x, we might have an regression there :/ Please open a bug for that.

Thanks for the hint, but one idea behind the howto is that people can build it easily from source to use + patch it and contribute that way ;=) That is not that easy if you just run precompiled binaries.

Thanks Peter, now I know why it kept asking me for the password whenever I opened a remote file. Also once it didn’t upload the changes after I saved them, instead, it promoted me to upload when I closed the file.

I wish you good luck with recharging your motivation. For me Kate was a really great editor few years back. I’m not using it right now, but I still care about its progress, and I hope to eventually have it back as my favourite editing tool.

The main reason I abandoned it (as I expressed too many times already) is inability to fold all the functions inside a PHP class. There was a menu option and a keystroke for that, and now they are gone. Folding toplevel nodes folds the whole ‘class’ section, and the functions remain expanded. It is equally pointless for CSS files, as it folds ‘@media screen{…}’ part, and not the declarations inside.

There’s another problem with files on remote filesystems mounted via sshfs. Kate thinks they are local and during the edits it keeps doing its internal file stuff after each keystroke. Which can be really slow if you have to work on megabyte or so of source code in a single file. Several years ago there was a switch that could disable this behaviour, but someone reported it as a bug (because this option supposedly was for something else), and it was promptly ‘fixed’.

There are ways to go around the second problem, but no the first. So I keep waiting and hoping for the better.

For: There’s another problem with files on remote filesystems mounted via sshfs. Kate thinks they are local and during the edits it keeps doing its internal file stuff after each keystroke. Which can be really slow if you have to work on megabyte or so of source code in a single file. Several years ago there was a switch that could disable this behaviour, but someone reported it as a bug (because this option supposedly was for something else), and it was promptly ‘fixed’.

Could be. I see that swap settings evolved a bit, and now allow to use a local directory. I did that, and despite no activity in the directory (don’t see any swap files there), remote editing works fine. Maybe I’m looking at wrong place.

Anyway, I gave Kate another try. I imported some dark color scheme (solarized dark is too blueish for me), tweaked it to make tabs and fold lines less intrusive, opened my php file, removed ‘class{‘ and matching ‘}’, folded toplevel nodes (at this point – the functions), restored ‘class{‘ declaration, and now I have document in somewhat acceptable state. I also discovered that to reopen file with preserved folding states I should not click that file in Dolphin, but use Kate’s ‘Open Recent’ instead.

I think I will stick with it for some time, despite less sophisticated backups and autocompletion/function hints than those found in NP++ (still NP++ with winscp, even on Wine, is the safest way for single-user remote editing).